is the united states spying on its allies turmoil continues for obamacare democratic congressman adam schiff and republican congresswoman terry joins us from the hill was the blazes amy holmes and democratic strategist. u.s. spying obamacare it's all tell about. politics with larry. the ticking of larry king and we start today with reaction to the latest revelations about the n.s.a. surveillance activities the agency hasn't just tap phone calls of millions of americans but those of top u.s. allies overseas joining us from capitol hill to discuss this is democratic

congressman a member of the house permanent select committee on intelligence adam schiff of california oh what do you make of this adam of. tapping in on foreign leaders who are allies. well it larry i'm not able to confirm or deny with those reports are correct but if they are correct obviously this is a good to cause a major disruption and even the perception is causing major disruption with our allies i think this is something that should be briefed to congress if it's going on it's not something that i was briefed on and i know that the senate intelligence committee chair feels exactly the same way because ultimately this is a tough policy decision that should be carefully weighed because of its potential disruptive impact certainly there is some spying that goes on even among allies and i think that's understood but when you get to the level of the heads of state or

a personal telephone i think there is a different expectation and as the president said and i think quite rightly we need to make sure that our intelligence gathering is consistent with our values and is not going to jeopardize these key relationships and so i'm looking to get to the bottom right now larry of whether the committee was made aware of this if it's going on and to make sure that the intelligence community has the same understanding that we on the committee do what it means in the intelligence act when it requires that significant intelligence activities be briefed to congress. what's more problems seem to you that the president didn't know about it or that he didn't know and didn't tell us. well i think either way it's problematic if the president was aware it over he wasn't aware of it because it's going to cause a major rupture with some of our allies and you know i think this is something that

chancellor merkel is taking very personally as well as others and when you have issues like this. they really need to rise to the highest level because i think ultimately it's a call that the president congress need to make about whether the risks are warranted whether the information is so essential i'm not going to say larry that it would be never appropriate to eavesdrop on a foreign leader even of one of our closest allies there may be exceptional circumstances where that is justified but i don't know that they're that that kind of analysis was done here i don't know how long and if this problem this program exists out long it was ongoing so those are important questions that i think we need to get to the bottom of it but either way larry whether the white house was aware of it or wasn't aware of it the problem remains the same. what do you make in capitol hill testimony this week the director of national intelligence james

clapper indicated that surveillance of leaders was not significant enough to require congress to know about it. well i had a fairly heated exchange over this very topic yesterday because i think plainly it is the kind of significant intelligence activities that must be briefed to congress in the area in an analogous area of covert action when the administration wants to undertake a covert action and there's the possibility that that covert action could blow back on us if it was discovered those are the things that are routinely briefed to the intelligence committees and for good reason but this similarly you have that potential as we're seeing you know very much manifest right now so that's precisely the kind of thing that should be briefed to the committees and i wasn't confident with the answer i got from the director yesterday that the intelligence community sees it the same way i asked very specifically would the tapping of a foreign leader be a significant intelligence activity that would be required to be reported and i got

a less than clear answer to that so i think we need to have a meeting of the minds between the intelligence community and the congress about just what ought to be disclosed and i think senator feinstein is going down exactly the right path which is to do dramatically more oversight on some of our foreign operations because larry we have a lot greater transparency in perspective at least from an oversight point of view on what goes on domestically we also have the safeguard of the pfizer court even though that court can be improved but in terms of overseas operations those operations are conducted under an executive authority called twelve triple three we need to do a much better job of oversight philosophically speaking adam don't you think that the american public that it runs against the psyche of the american public to tap phones. well you know i think it

certainly raises the most fundamental privacy concerns among the american people no one wants to have their phone tapped at the same time and as speaking as a former prosecutor i think americans are completely comfortable with the idea that with appropriate due process like in a criminal case where you suspect someone is involved in either a terrorist plot or they're involved in organized crime that wiretaps can be perfectly appropriate the question here is are we striking the right balance are is there enough protection are we surveilling when we need to and should and leaving alone the overwhelming number of people who don't have any involvement in terrorism or criminality. congressman schiff you're an outstanding member of congress keep up the great work done the member of the house permanent select committee on intelligence thanks for being with us well larry it's great to be with you it's wonderful to hear your voice and truly a treat to be on your show thank you adam. now we turn to the latest news on

obamacare a confidential report obtained by c.n.n. shows that the main contractor for the obamacare web site gave the obama administration warnings back in september at the web site wasn't ready to go live joining me from the capital now to discuss this is the republican congressman and then member of the energy and commerce committee lead terry of nebraska iowa congressman terry i know you're very concerned about this that confidential report that shows that. the obama administration knew in september that there will warnings or should have known that there were warnings what do you make of this whole thing. well it's very interesting larry that there are so many circumstances that have come out not only in this web site knowing that there was these type of faults but he's never seems to be into the queue for all of this information and i find that extremely disturbing that

sebelius would not keep the president up to date on what's occurring although she did testify today that she was. so what what do we make of this is this. government in trouble is it heads roll what's your i mean obviously we've got a lawyer as some this is got to take affect some time where do we go with this. well that's the people are in limbo right now what we what we have here is a web site that is so messed up that it's not usable even testified today larry that this was a functioning web site at the same time it was completely crashed she doesn't even know what's going on here and what i find mostly disturbing here is that with all of the problems that she was completely unprepared for they didn't know about.

the glitches they call them they didn't do the testing she admitted that they didn't do the testing what that means is that we can't really trust them if they can't get a six hundred million dollar website correct how can we trust them to take care of our health care since they now own health care so i think the public. has a there's been a breach of trust with the public and they don't know if this system's going to work. but we do know that the public wants help and they want health care and i know you aren't for the bill do you want to pay oh well i want there to be great help. all care that people can rely on and the president said and this is another area where people are just you know they're they dissed don't know if they can trust what they're hearing anymore because the president told people for three years that if you have a policy you like you can keep it and what we found out in this last week is that

absolutely not true and the president knew it was not true that i have hundreds of constituents maybe even thousands of these are just the ones that have contacted my office larry with their cancellation letters for the policies that they've had for years and now they have to go into another policy go on to the exchange and what they're finding is that it's more expensive and they're getting a less health care hired a doctor bills higher co-pays and that's not fair to them so these are the things that really create distrust in the system so who's the fall big government or the insurance companies. well i don't think it's the choice here you know the the frankly the insurance companies are just the distribution system anymore the government really controls what's allowed to be

sold by these insurance companies they they've limited the amount of expenditures that they can handle and they've limit the profit so really what we have is a government run system but using the old insurance companies as the distribution model i wish it was an open and free competitive market where they could really compete against each other but it's hard to have competition when every facet of that policy is dictated to you by the health and human services. lee you've introduced legislation is age three three six two. requiring the help and human services department to submit weekly updates on health care why. well because we aren't receiving information about who is in attempting to enroll enroll or what plans they're getting or even who is signing them up i called our state election commissioner and our governor's office asking for information about

nebraskans and nobody our governor and department of insurance had no information so obviously the secretary of h.h.s. sebelius doesn't want there to be information flowing back to the states who it's there the governor and the insurance commissioner's responsibility to make sure people have proper insurance they can't do their job so i introduced a bill that says that the h.h.s. kathleen kathleen sebelius has to report the numbers back weekly now the interesting thing about it is when the contractors who built this web site testified in front of our committee last week larry they said they know exactly how many people have been enrolled and how many of trial gotten into the system so far but yet h.h.s. kathleen sebelius says that they don't have reliable information on it but the contractors do. do you think she should resign lay.

i think i'm not calling for a resignation yet she has promised that the glitches will all be fixed by the end of this month or the end of the month here in november and if it's not then i think there should be a chorus bipartisan chorus asking her to step down. you said recently that it's destined to fail. do you want to deface i know i want there to be a good health care and what i what i'm concerned about is any gap so if it's going to pay all i want there to be enough notice that we can have a replacement system where there would be seamless and the reality is for those getting a cancellation letter it is less then seamless because the x. they can't get into the exchanges now when they do are they don't know when they can give you and they don't know if there's going to be extensions so whatever we would reply to someone this system fails has to be up and running so it would be

seamless look forward to talking to you again thanks for giving us some time. to. your office and thank you larry we thank you we thank congressman terry an early had to congressman schiff as well when we were chair and we'll chat more about obamacare and that's a spine with amy holmes the anchor of populist on blaze t.v. and the democratic strategist richard fowler who hosts the online program the rich and power shows right back. we'll be. hearing. that that will make their lives to. sleep. we'll mc.

the solo. the cellular . or the. we're back joining me now to debate obamacare n.s.a. spying and a lot more is the anchor of the hottest on glenn beck's the blaze t.v. independent amy holmes she's in new york and in washington the democratic strategist and host of the online news program the rich and frolic show is rich's himself was out with amy all right what about the revelation that the n.s.a. is now surveilling our friends and saluting the president of germany what do you

make of that amy. well i would say it's probably nothing new we know that it happened under the bush administration and for the past five years and that other world leaders spy on us as well they were recent reports that russia may have tried to spy on a diplomats at the g twenty summit back in september in st petersburg but what i do think is new is the public outcry and the very loud opposition by our allies to what they see as this very intrusive surveillance i think that's a lot of trouble and i think that's a big problem for the white house that a big problem is being made of it. richard why wasn't it a big problem if it was done under the bush administration as well whether the reason why it's a big problem larry is everything to the fact that we continue to see this i guess this surveillance culture this intelligence culture go a little bit too far and that is why people are making the outcry they're making now they didn't make previously but amy is right we've seen this in years past and

years previous each countries countries spying on each other but in the day what it boils down to is because of the n.s.a. leaks because of ed snowden and the attention on it now it's sort of become you know we've made a it's become a mountain out of and. if you believe it i mean when obama said he didn't know about it. i hope he did actually we would like to think that the president of the united states the commander in chief is aware of spying on his allied leaders that he sits face to face with and meets with every day we have reports that he had direct quotes that were presented to him in briefing papers i hope you understood where those quotes were coming from. how does it affect the relationship isn't there the kind of the next time the president gets on the phone and talks to germany isn't that. kind of a weird situation though most definitely definitely a weird situation to sort of be in for this president again but where i disagree

with a.b. is they don't necessarily know the present knew but i think the intelligence culture has gotten so big that there's no way the president keep tabs on everybody if they're spying on him because of the fuss because of how the fires of course are set up under the bush administration it's hard to know who they have warrants out on who they don't have warrants out on who they're spawning on who they're not spying on and so i think after nine eleven we've seen this continued culture of expanded and expanded intelligence for intelligence sakes that it's almost at the point where it's really hard for the present keep tabs on all of it. anyway now but i think i meant what you say. partly i was gonna say if anything that's an indictment of the president's lack of leadership over his own spying mechanism and what we're talking about is surveilling the chancellor of germany we're not talking about low ranking diplomats or even i mean there are allegations of private citizens but the president should certainly know when the chancellor of germany is being surveilled but come on now i mean i beg to differ

here because you know the idea that there's so much that happens in the united states government there's so many pieces to it that it's really hard just isolate one situation where the president should know should not have known we already know this president like every president american history there sort of kept in this situation where the oval office is sort of shielded off of a lot of this information and it's hard to say if the president said he didn't know about it in the president didn't know bout it. that regard i mean what about the future commander in chief that is one of his roles and i mean what about maybe we get a bipartisan proposal to end the sweeping look into united states phone records shouldn't that stop. well you know it's interesting that this isn't coming down along sort of you know clean partisan lines senator dianne feinstein has said that she is totally opposed to surveillance of foreign leaders and then you see republicans like mr peter king the congressman from new york city who said come on get over it this is what we do it protects our national security so i think you're

seeing some interesting partnerships on this issue but again the president apparently was made aware of this back in the in the summer and they say that they do not and will not continue this surveillance and what about the surveillance of american phone records that and richard well i mean i don't know larry i think we have to wait to see what this congress doesn't if they really choose to do i think a me is right is that there are some odd bedfellows on this particular topic and i think we'll continue to see more and more of that in washington because you have those folks that are part of the tea party in the far right who want to end these type of surveillance and then you have your peter kings and your john mccain to think they're ok and then you have folks who are part of the more establishment left like your dianne feinstein who's saying hey listen i think we need to end this i think is going to be very very interesting to see if we can get anything through this congress to and you know warrantless wiretapping of u.s. citizens ok guys let's turn our attention to some other areas obamacare amy what went wrong. well you'd have to ask kathleen sebelius except for the fact that

she's not really answering any of these questions first of all we have this web site that you've been absent today while she was giving congressional testimony it was down wasn't working was crashing and that's a big problem for obamacare because the architecture of obamacare is for people to go to this website log on and shop for insurance. thing about young healthy people and young people you know they shop online and if obamacare doesn't work then the architecture of obamacare falls apart but there's a lot of finger pointing i would say that kathleen sebelius is not long for her job . do opponents want to say oh. larry of course they want to fail they want to feels they can pick up a political win and i think you can point you could point fingers all over the place but you can point one place we can squarely point a finger is the inch the private insurance industry they want this bill to fail because they don't want to be overtly regulated and because of that they sent these cancellation letters they really they really just gone too far on this one and let

me let me break that doctor's little bit more because insurance companies what they could say in these letters are hey listen we you know we're going to make your policy better because of the affordable care act and therefore we're not canceling your policy we're going to roll you over with your approval to a policy as part of the exchange what they're sending out in exchange that of these blanket cancellation letters saying call in to see if you can read and roll and they're really misguiding the american people the truth of the matter is the small population of innovators that will benefit from the from the from the exchange are going to qualify for a tax subsidy from them a qualifier a tax subsidy and fifty percent of them also have preexisting conditions so they couldn't get health care prior to the affordable care act and because of the affordable care act they can now get health care they can now be part of the marketplace they can finally have a chance to see a doctor and i think that's the good of the bill because opponents in so much time trying to demonize it and defeated we haven't talked about the benefits that people are seeing all across this country amy how do you respond to that. well apparently the insurance company is the new villain in the obamacare debacle insurance

companies were actually in favor of obamacare because it meant that because we know that every american now has a mandate to buy health insurance meant for them millions of new customers but i don't think any of the blame shifting is going to work obamacare is called obama care it has the president's name on it he's embraced that and a year from now we're going to see what's happening with these insurance rates that are already going up for so many americans who are getting sticker sticker shock this is being reported across the press the president can't be can't hide behind insurance companies are always different villains when in fact this is a key legislative accomplishment and for his sake for his presidency it needs to work agree with you there and you know i think history will be the true judge nobody in history will judge whether or not the website didn't work in the first three weeks of the first month or even the first two months what history will judge is did americans get health care to young people get a chance to go to the doctor did a child with asthma because they might have had a heart transplant when they were one or two years old do they get did they get

a chance to get treatment because of the ending of makin a mandatory maximums on health care coverage and i think history will show favorably for this president and for this law is it true i mean that opponents of the bill didn't want this to work and they don't want a national health program. certainly that's true obamacare was passed on a purely partisan basis only by democrats it was done in the cloak of night with crazy legislative procedures during christmas time it didn't get a single republican vote republicans would support more free market approaches to health care but getting back to this idea that it's only a website what's the big deal the big deal is you need to use the website so that people can buy young healthy people can buy this health insurance that is basically going to cost them more than what they're taking out that subsidizes all of those folks that richard was talking about so if the website doesn't work and those people don't sign on then you're going to see health care premiums spiral it's

called the death spiral and it's going to spiral out of control which will only then. people to maybe that's just not enough and they'd rather. have a status that certainly if there is a great there is a great danger of the death spiral of insurance premiums going so high that people would rather pay the fine than buy health family but in the states where the state decide where the governors of the mayors the district of columbia which should be a state where they decided to invent their own health care exchange we saw health care premiums go down it's only in states where republican governors and obstructionists of this law decided not to help their citizens out not to expand medicaid we've seen the problems with the with the affordable care act so let's be very clear and point the blame where the blame should go you have a private industry that will do everything possible to make sure that they're not regulated and you have republican governors who are funded by these private industry individuals to make sure they don't implement the law in their states and that is what this boils down to and that's just the end of it. i want to touch

some other bases. on the congressional elections next year. well when you have hundreds of thousands of people getting those cancellation letters that their health insurance that they liked that they were told they could keep they can't because of obamacare regulations because a basket of benefits that they didn't necessarily want in the first place when you have elderly people being told they have to pay for maternity coverage these are people who are active and they're going to vote and same for middle class families their health insurance premiums going up including in california for example one of those blue states that richard was talking about where folks are complaining about that and middle class voters elderly voters they are very active particularly and midterms and if you have young people who didn't even sign up in the first place how are you going to get into the polls. another political area for you is if mcauliffe wins in virginia a former democratic strategist apparently ahead in the polls well let me see you

enjoy the party but i think what terry mcauliffe the chairman of whatever ginia means is that this whole idea of this tea party notion in a recent poll came out indicating that the people in virginia are actually disgusted with the tea party they're disgusted with obstruction really was hurt hardest by this government shutdown tea party shutdown may i add i think this will be the beginning of the end for the tea party as a political force in this country they've gone too far and the american people can smell it they can smell that you know the roses are really really roses larry and at the end of the day the tea party is a party of obstruction and with that being said the republican party is the party of obstruction so i think the win for terry mcauliffe says that conclusion ali and concern is that to his ideology are wrong for america in the wrong for the state of virginia i mean i'll give you the last word but less than a minute. i think terry mcauliffe winning in virginia will prove to the republican party that the shutdown strategy was a losing one there was

a lot of controversy and conflict within the g.o.p. about that and as we know in virginia there are a lot of federal workers who were furloughed and very unhappy with the republican shutdown so i agree with richard on that point that in terms of the g o p this will be counting against that tea party strategy thank you both very much always great speaking with a good meeting you richard amy holmes and richard fella and thanks to do my earlier guest congressman adam schiff and we carry from our viewers out there i want to hear from you join the conversation on my facebook page share your thoughts on twitter by tweeting king's things and using the politicking hash tag that's all for this week's politics thanks again for what.

time was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. we are there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news the new. alexander's family cry tears of the lawyer and in great things out there that there has to be adequate brander in a court of law on the phone lines this is a story made sort of movies playing out in real life. this. kind of. and they. might. and that's like the politicians write the law and let's put that. up.

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